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Wednesday, 14 August 2013

Marriage is the end of the road...

Welcome guest blogger, Zee Monodee!

I was 14 when I received my first
proposal. No, it wasn’t from my then-boyfriend! Instead, a professional
matchmaker – called an agwa here –
brought this offer to the table. How did this happen? I had been to my cousin’s
wedding, and there, dressed in a lehenga suit (you know those Indian outfits
with long embroidered skirts and short, equally embroidered blouses, with a
hugely heavy drape called a dupatta), I easily looked to be around 18 with my
long hair pulled up in a complicated updo (yes, we stopped at nothing to shine
at weddings. Some even went as far as outshining the bride, but she’d probably
not mind, seeing how an Indian or Indian-origin Muslim wedding went on for
about 4-5 days).

The match? A young doctor, 26 years
old, who’d recently come back from England after his studies. Very good
prospect (I mean, a doctor!), from a good family, and better yet, he had fair
skin. In short, a handsome boy. And he was ready to wait for me to finish high
school!

That match received a ‘no’ from me.
Seriously, I was 14! But it was the first of many such ‘good’ proposals I
fended off between then and the age of 17 (when I did get married! That’s
another story, but in a nutshell, my British boyfriend, who, thank goodness for
the family, happened to be a Muslim boy, and I couldn’t be allowed to ‘date’
seriously. It’s marriage or the highway. We were married shortly after...and
divorced just as quickly. So here I was at 18, back in Mauritius, a divorcee,
while my peers were graduating high school. Springboard for penning this
story.... Anyway....)

In traditional societies like India
(whether you’re Hindu, Muslim, Tamil, or even Christian), a girl is ‘allowed’
to flitter around like a caged butterfly until she is 20, tops. If she gets
married before then, all the better, because let’s face it, what else is there
for girls except than to become wives and produce the first offspring
(preferably a male!) a year later? Beyond 20, she starts to become a ‘case’
because *gasp* what if she ends up an old maid?

Such is the case for the Indian
diaspora all over the world, and the Indo-Mauritian community is no different.
Marriage is the end of the road for a woman.

So what happens when that marriage
explodes, and you end up getting divorced? Back in the year 2000 and around, it
meant you’d be shunned, labeled a divorcee as if that was a scarlet letter to
be ashamed of. And also, how dare you even imagine you can end up with a
‘proper’ boy when you are ‘tarnished’? (Understand by that, a man not a divorcé
or a widower).

What happens is that you, as the
‘jilted’ woman in this equation, put on your big girl knickers and go out to
forge your own path on your own terms. Sod what the rest of the world thinks or
how they are labeling you – life is waiting for you; you simply have to embrace
it.

Less than a year after my divorce, I
met a man, who was divorced too, and that shared bond of being ‘castaways’
became the foundation on which we built a marriage that has been going strong
for over a decade now.

Divorce paints
a scarlet letter on her back when she returns to the culture-driven society of
Mauritius. This same spotlight shines as a beacon of hope for the man who never
stopped loving her. Can the second time around be the right one for these
former teenage sweethearts?

Indian-origin
Lara Reddy left London after her husband dumps her for a more accommodating
uterus—at least, that’s what his desertion feels like. Bumping into him and his
pregnant new missus doesn’t help matters any, and she thus jumps on a
prestigious job offer. The kicker? The job is in Mauritius, the homeland of her
parents, and a society she ran away from over a decade earlier.

But once
there, Lara has no escape. Not from the gossip, the contempt, the harassing
matchmaking...and certainly not from the man she hoped never to meet again. The
boy she’d loved and lost—white Mauritian native, Eric Marivaux.

Back when they
were teens, Eric left her, and Lara vowed she’d never let herself be hurt
again. Today, they are both adults, and facing the same crossroads they’d stood
at so many years earlier.

Lara now
stands on the other side of Mauritian society. Will this be the impetus she
needs to take a chance on Eric and love again?